German Army's role in Holocaust

Very well-said. Also, thanks for the book info.

 

The Wermacht was not evil, it just was'nt innocent.

 

Something tell me that the population of Western Europe and Eastern Europe, might differ in opinion here.

 

Surely what they contributed would allow one to say the same of them.

 

Duplicate Post

 

I strongly recommend Omer Bartov's The Eastern Front: German Troops and the Barbarization of Warfare on this very subject; Meagre's War of Annihilation is also worth a look.

The German Army's help was absolutely essential to the workings of the Einsatzgruppen, because the latter had no independent capacity to supply or service itself. Their movements also had to be coordinated with other ground forces units using the few roads or rail lines. The army also directly participate in many liquidation missions.

In a typical Einsatzgruppe operation, the victims had to be rounded up and the killing sites cordoned off by the regular service troops. The special task forces were just too small to handle such tasks and were not designed to operate independently. The actual dirty work of executing the victims would be left to the SS specialists however, as it took a special kind of men to liquidate tens of thousands of people and sometimes more in a day without becoming utterly insane.

A few army commanders such as von Reichenau welcomed the presence of the Einsatzgruppen and there are cases in which the front line units requested them. You have to wrap your mind arround this: the Army considered massed killings an effective rear area security measure. Army Security Divisions performed the same tasks (IIRC) as the SS Einsatzgruppen since they were considered to have overlapping if not identical functions. Generally though regular troops didn't participate in the large scale killings of over ten thousand or so many men.

The Heer did kill a good number of civilians, usually no more than thousands at the biggest sweeps, as collective punishment for partisan activity, perceived crimes, or failure to comply requisition orders. As per Commissar Order, the German soldiers would the authority to execute on the spot any communist party member, Jews, local economic or political leaders, partisans, and other suspect groups.

 

It seems that only the Waffen-SS "security" killings (Odaur, Tulle, etc.)have been well studied yet they are all relatively small in scale (200-1000-something civilian kills). Did the Army kill far more than the Waffen-SS?

 

Well, Einsatzgruppen killings were of considerably larger scale. The biggest
and the most infamous, the massacre of Babi Yar, liquidated more than 30,000 people (according to a German Situation Report filed by the unit at the time) in just two days and it was one part of the big operation arround Kiev. For major '41 operations tens of thousands of victims murdered apiece was not uncommon, but after '42 the death toll was considerably lower if for no reason other than the exhaustion of potential victims.

The Masters of Death is a good book to read on the subject of SS/Einsatzgruppe/SD operations of this kind, though it is not for the faint of heart as the scenes it described are disturbing to the extreme. The title came from a quote of an SS prisoner, who said in his interrogation about an Einsatzgruppe commander that men who could kill women and children in the day, eat supper at night and sleep soundly "was truly the masters of life and death."

 

Correct.

I found it truly sickening in parts and should only be read if you know the subject in question as the author dose not hold back on the information.

 

30,000 seems like a small toll compared to the millions that were supposedly killed by the EG..

 

30,000 in one action under 48 hours, Wolfy. The total death count was much higher as the Einsatzgruppen were working round the clock.

 

I have this book and where is this quote?

I was more thinking along the lines of an SS officer being quoted saying that that a SS commando who receives the order to kill 300 children and kills 150 of them himself is truly the lord of life and death.

 

That's it. The copy I read belongs to the university library and I haven't have a chance to buy one for myself. It's a bit hard to buy English books in where I am now.

 

the wehrmacht did play a part in the holocaust but it was mainly the ss who killed all the jews during that time

 

I'd definitely second Omer Bartov's work.

Hitler's Willing Executers however is useless as historical scholarship.
It is brilliantly refuted by Norman Finkelstein and Ruth Bettina Birn in their book,
A Nation on Trial: the Goldhagen Thesis and Historical Truth.

 

I have nearly bought this a few times over the years but was always a bit undecided am i right in thinking there is little besides this in print on the SS/Einsatzgruppe/SD operations.

 

Coincidentally, I've just bought both these books - the Stein title today ( together with an original copy of 'Lost Victories' ). I'm looking forward to reading them.....

 

The German Army And Genocide: Crimes Against War Prisoners, Jews, And Other Civilians - edited by the Hamburg Institute For Social Research (ISBN: 1-56584-525-0) is full of photos and narrative about the Wehrmacht's role in various war crimes (still listed on Amazon).

And also...

Hitler's Foreign Executioners: Europes Dirty Secret by Christopher Hale (ISBN: 0007249012) - this may be of help but as it is a new release I haven't got round to ordering it yet.

 

wehrmacht 1939-1945 it's a book 6 yers worth!